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Announcing Azure Service Fabric: Reducing Complexity in a Hyper-scale World

Cloud computing continues to change the way that businesses reach their customers. In today’s hyper-competitive environment, ISVs and startups are on the leading edge of this change. They are constantly challenged to find better ways to build scalable cloud services in order to get to market quickly. For developers, growing their businesses while designing for reliability and scale are equally challenging.
Last month we released Azure App Service, a high productivity solution for developers who need to create enterprise-grade web and mobile app experiences. App Service provides a complete platform as a service solution that enables you to deploy and elastically scale applications in the cloud, and seamlessly integrate them with on-premises resources and SaaS based applications. We have tens of thousands of customers using Azure App Service today, including Heineken, Hogarth Worldwide, Telenor and Smartvue.
Today we are excited to announce an additional offering – Azure Service Fabric – that provides a high control platform that enables developers and ISVs to build cloud services with a high degree of scalability and customization. Service Fabric was born from our years of experience delivering mission-critical cloud services and has been in production for more than five years. It provides the foundational technology upon which we run our Azure core infrastructure and also powers services like Skype for Business, InTune, Event Hubs, DocumentDB, Azure SQL Database (across more than 1.4 million customer databases) and Bing Cortana - which can scale to process more than 500 million evaluations per second.
This experience has enabled us to design a platform that intrinsically understands the available infrastructure resources and needs of applications, enabling automatically updating, self-healing behavior that is essential to delivering highly available and durable services at hyper-scale. We’re now making this battle-hardened technology available for everyone use – not a version of what we use, but the exact technology we use ourselves.
Service Fabric offers the following benefits:

It supports creating both stateless and stateful microservices – an architectural approach where complex applications are composed of small, independently versioned services – to power the most complex, low-latency, data-intensive scenarios and scale them into the cloud.

Provides the benefits of orchestration and automation for microservices with new levels of app awareness and insight.

Solves hard distributed systems problems like state management and provides application lifecycle management capabilities so developers don’t have to re-architect their applications as usage grows.

Includes Visual Studio tooling as well as command line support, which enables developers to quickly and easily build, test, debug, deploy and update their Service Fabric applications on single-box deployments, test deployments and production deployments.

One example of an early customer who is using Service Fabric is OSIsoft, a San Francisco Bay Area software company, who chose Service Fabric to enhance their on-premises PI System with new Azure-based offerings to unlock an Internet of Things-scale solution. Today the PI System collects, stores, analyses, and shares streaming sensor-based data from more than 450 source types. The OSIsoft solution leveraging Service Fabric enables new customer driven insights by durably processing data from hundreds of millions of meters every few seconds – shattering previous on-premises records.
To get early customer feedback, a developer preview of Service Fabric will be released at BUILD. With our unique commitment to deliver a consistent cloud across public, hosted and private clouds, we will deliver the solution on-premises in the next version of Windows Server. While our initial offering will target Windows, we will also support Linux in the future. Finally, we will have migration guidance available to customers using Azure Cloud Services who want the benefits of Azure Service Fabric.
To learn more, check out the recording of my BUILD session in which I introduce Azure Service Fabric and live demo it scaling up to 50 machines running over 250,000 operations/second on Azure. The Developer SDK is also now available for download, with Visual Studio tooling and a fully functional Service Fabric runtime for you to experience developing and deploying services in a one-box environment.